Chapter 3
The garden was almost dark now and, of Cora’s party guests, only the three women were left outside.
The kitchen glowed with lights like a doll’s house, and the garden was lit up with coloured bulbs, like a grotto.
Cora, Megan and Gladdie were still sitting under the apple tree, tinted in jewelled tones like figures in a stained-glass window.
‘Here she comes,’ Megan said out of the side of her mouth.
Walking carefully up the garden, tiptoeing in her heels and neutrals, Gwyn’s fiancée Fiona, a sharp-faced blonde, habitually late, said firmly, ‘Just to let you know we’ve tidied up and we’re off now, Cora.
’ Propping her hands on her hips, she added, ‘And by the way, Island Farm Camp was Gwyn’s idea, not mine. I don’t do camps.’
Fatal.
‘Don’t you, Fiona?’ Gladdie asked her in mock surprise. ‘We do. We’ve always done camps, haven’t we, Cora?’ Under the gentle glow of the coloured lights, Gladdie’s pink hair had turned orange.
‘Always,’ Cora said seriously.
Fiona narrowed her eyes.
Cora smiled at her to show it was a joke because Fiona was almost family now.
Fiona lifted her chin belligerently. ‘I told Gwyn you’d like a silk scarf, but he didn’t listen.’
‘Aww. That would have been nice, too.’
Before leaving, Gwyn came across the lawn with a plate of hot sausage rolls to keep them going. No sooner had he set them down than Fiona grabbed his arm, almost spilling them on the table.
‘I’ve told them we’re off,’ she said pointedly.
‘That’s right. We’re off.’ Still linked to his fiancée, Gwyn kissed Cora’s cheek awkwardly, and Megan’s and Gladdie’s, and then he rested his free hand on his mother’s head. ‘Your hair is all green.’
Cora caught his hand, and squeezed it.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he added, ‘I had a long chat with your cleaning lady. She was a lawyer, back home, before the war started. Interesting woman.’
‘Where’s home?’ Megan asked.
‘Kosovo.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Did you get her to smile for you?’ Cora asked him curiously. ‘She never smiles.’
‘Eh?’ He looked confused. ‘Was I meant to try? Ow!’
‘Good night,’ Fiona said to them firmly, flapping her free hand. ‘Don’t stay up too late.’
As their two black silhouettes flattened the silvery grass and went into the house, Megan reached for a sausage roll and said, ‘She pinched him, you know. I saw her knuckles go white.’
‘“Don’t stay up too late”?’ Gladdie repeated in a low and scornful tone. ‘Cheek!’
‘Fiona’s all right. Gwyn seems happy at any rate.’ Cora could love her forever for that.
‘She’s no Regina though, is she?’
‘No,’ Cora agreed, ‘she’s no Regina.’
Regina had been sweet and kind, and no one had a bad word to say about her, not even Gladdie, who could find a weak spot in a person in a single probe.
When Gwyn was forty and Lottie was fourteen, Regina had died of sepsis. Cora knew from experience that there was no right way to handle grief, no signposts; you just had to battle through it as best you could.
For Gwyn it meant shutting himself off. For Lottie, it meant going with boys.
She had gone off the rails for a while, big time.
Smoking, boys, cider. There was gossip, of course, and Cora heard it without comment or defence.
Well, if it helped her to cope, that’s just the way it was.
There was no point in pulling her up on it or threatening her with the worst that could happen. The worst had happened.
Sepsis. Cora had never heard of it before, it seemed like some new and dreadful disease, but it turned out it was another word for blood poisoning.
Blood poisoning, in this day and age! And her so houseproud!
It was the disease of the battlefield, of injuries, bacteria, bad sanitation.
But the sepsis had got Regina, very unfairly, as she was a lovely wife, a sweet mother. It was cruel.
During those endless days of sorrow, Lottie came to stay with Cora on and off, when she felt like it.
It wasn’t an arrangement as such, it was just somewhere to go when she needed to grieve somewhere fresh.
Gwyn had his own grief to get through. There was a disconnected look about him.
He never blinked. He was unreachable, watchful, resigned – as if he was locked away alone in a cage and there was no escape.
He came round to Cora’s too, sometimes, to get away, and those nights when the three of them were in the house, even though or because it was for such a sad reason, Cora would stay up late on the sofa, guarding them.
She was fiercely glad to offer them sanctuary.
With them asleep upstairs it felt like home again.
And then Gwyn met Fiona, and she was so pretty and carefree that his dimmed spirit grew bright again.
But the truth was, through no fault of Fiona’s, Regina was a hard act to follow.
‘It’s amazing the things you get over,’ Cora said now, and she was, truly, genuinely amazed.
‘Yes!’ Megan said passionately. ‘Thank the Lord!’
Gladdie’s thoughts had taken a different turn. ‘So Elisavet was a lawyer back home. She might have told us. Deceitful, I call it. Which war is it, do you think? It’s hard to keep track.’
‘All wars are the same in the end. No wonder she doesn’t smile,’ Cora said.
‘Imagine,’ she reflected, ‘moving somewhere with very little of your own. Leaving everything behind like that, starting afresh in a new land, with a new language, and not easily understanding or being understood. The small details of a life – home, clothes, a china tea service, invitations for parties and weddings, service sheets from funerals, leaving everything that has a part of your history attached to it.’ She suddenly remembered Elisavet’s question to her, the only question she’d ever asked her, now she thought about it: Was he a soldier?
A night breeze rocked the glow of the lights, green, blue, orange and yellow, stroking their faces, their clothes with colours. Cora glanced at her watch. It was still her birthday! She reached for the bottle with a sudden surge of happiness. ‘Many happy returns to me!’ she said.